Obama writes about PM Modi in Time magazine, calls him ‘India’s reformer-in-chief’

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been extended an unusual honour by “my friend Barack” Obama – the US president penned the profile of Modi in Time magazine’s most recent issue on the world’s 100 most influential people. Modi was quick to respond with a thank you on Twitter.

Obama’s three paragraph sketch praises Modi in the language of a liberal-left president. He opens by noting Modi’s rise from the son of a tea-seller to the head of the world’s largest democracy and how this “reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.”

Obama then picks out the bits of Modi’s agenda that an Afro-American Democratic Party leader would most appreciate: helping the poor, empowering women and “confronting climate change.” There is a mention of yoga and Digital India but nothing of Make in India or the Indian prime minister’s hard face towards Pakistan.

The issue of religious minorities is touched upon in the last paragraph. Obama notes how, when the two had been at the Martin Luther King jr memorial, “Narendra and I” reflected on King and Mahatma Gandhi and “how the diversity of backgrounds and faiths in our countries is a strength we have to protect.” Modi, the US president writes, “recognizes” that a billion “Indians living and succeeding toager can be an inspiring model for the world.”

Obama’s gentle reminders to Modi that as a prime minister he needs to sustain the pluralism and secularity of India has been a subtext of the recent revival of Indo-US relations. This was notably lacking in Obama’s statements when Manmohan Singh was in power, though the US president lost patience with Singh’s inability to fulfill any of his policy promises. (Continue to next page)